Shield of Pretending.

If you look at the way positive or negative feedbacks travel, they are exactly the same, leaving a person and landing within you, the only difference is the content or is the only difference from where it comes? Or is it the real affect, you. Can you change a positive to a negative by how you hear it? Is it possible our state of being had more to do with the incoming message than the message itself? How about our expectations of the person and the difference in what they are saying compared to what we believe they should be saying, that our forecast is failing us? I have a feeling that our inner reception area is very much filled with expectations and needs and desires, leaving little room for incoming truths to show up as themselves, we have demands and commands for them. Is it possible there are no negative messages, just messages to show us the way? And a negative becomes a positive if you lay its truthfulness against your life. It is my belief that there are truthful positive feedbacks, and then there are pretend positive feedbacks. Pretend ones are much more common than truthful feedbacks…and way easy to give. Words that won’t hurt another’s pretend life…for you don’t want to be the one to shatter their world with a truth. I have great respect and admiration for the folks who tell you what you don’t want to hear, compared to the ones who just are parrots to you. Mostly when folks get what they call a negative comment, they never stick around long enough to ask why; it is the story behind the remark that’s important. The one instance that I stuck around to ask why, I was shocked to find, that this person cared about Art as deeply as I did, and he was able to tell me why. I had watered down the art with craft like ideas, and when explained, it made perfect sense to me. That if I had aspirations of being an Artist, there were guidelines, however subtle that kept art from being a craft, and I had crossed the line. His truthfulness kept me on track, he didn’t pretend positive feedback to spare my feelings, for sparing me would have hurt my art. This is true in all of life…sparing our feelings hurt them in the long run, for we are led to believe that which isn’t true. My most positive influences in my life have been folks who have been brutally honest, not caring about hurting my feelings; rather they say what they have to say in order for me stop hurting myself by pretending that which isn’t true. Isn’t a false positive really a negative in disguise? I also believe we need huge amounts of false positives to keep our lives of pretend working; we need others to shield us from ourselves. But, if you are standing in your own truth, you don’t need anyone’s feedback to keep your life going, your life just goes. You are as you are, there isn’t this thirst for others to keep your life going, and you are able to be self-sustaining. You seek out any part of your own life that isn’t truthful, wanting to uncover instead of cover up the pretend places. Living authentically is to live outside the covers, to crawl out yourself and not pretend even to make others feel okay. It seems this false positive can go either way, flowing from us as well as into us. It is up to us to put up a filter that can discern fact from fiction, both coming and going. Art and writing seem to be the process of building this filter, of facing yourself for the first time without the shield of pretending.